English Novels

"John says one of the most difficult things is getting used to new faces, new faces."

"He wanted to take the body … and dig a grave for him… for would that have been more purposeful, would he have done the first thing of vague since coming into this war?"

"John says he may have a head to lose but certainly not a heart."

"He thought, we need him, he has something that none of us have."

"He was almost beside himself in a rush of dread on Barton’s behalf."

"Had seen that Barton has appalled by the sight of Feurvy, as he had not been by the sight of the dead pilot in the crashed plane."

"There is no one that knows. Don’t go."

"She was like the others. Understood nothing."

"He knew that when he left here, he would not be able to believe that it would all continue to exist."

"We can imagine it thats all."

"…pieces of a past belonging to some stranger."

"He thought I want to go back for there was nothing for him here."

"Then he thought that he could hear the thudding of the guns. But there were so many noises now, imagined or remembered."

"But wasn’t Harris better off? For would he not have gone through terror after terror in the front line, only to meet a death less sudden, more painful, more clearly foreseen?"

"He tried not to count over all the possible ways in which, after tomorrow, he was going to die."

"But I have been ashamed of myself for getting so thoroughly hardened so quickly."

"They seem like some dream country which we inhabited long ago."

"We seek him here,we seek him there, Those Frenchies seek him everywhere! Is he in heaven? Is he in hell? Where is that damn elusive Pimpernel! He gives the Frenchies nothing but frustration Popping in and out each week! Spoiling every lovely execution LA! What cheek!"

"We all are caught in the middle of one long treacherous riddle. Can I trust you? Should you trust me too?... We shamble on through this hell taking on more secrets to sell 'til there comes a day when we sell our souls away."

"It is only when we are very happy, that we can bear to gaze merrily upon the vast and limitless expanse of water, rolling on and on with such persistent, irritating monotony, to the accompaniment of our thoughts, whether grave or gay. When they are gay, the waves echo their gaiety; but when they are sad, then every breaker, as it rolls, seems to bring additional sadness, and to speak to us of hopelessness and of the pettiness of all our joys."

"Sing! Swing! Savor the sting! As she severs you Madame Guillotine. Slice! Come paradise! You'll be smitten with Madame Guillotine!"

"The Scarlet Pimpernel works in the dark, and his identity is only known under the solemn oath of secrecy to his immediate followers."

""The Scarlet Pimpernel?" said Suzanne, with a merry laugh. "Why! what a droll name! What is the Scarlet Pimpernel, Monsieur?" She looked at Sir Andrew with eager curiosity. The young man's face had become almost transfigured. His eyes shone with enthusiasm; hero-worship, love, admiration for his leader seemed literally to glow upon his face. "The Scarlet Pimpernel, Mademoiselle," he said at last "is the name of a humble English wayside flower; but it is also the name chosen to hide the identity of the best and bravest man in all the world, so that he may better succeed in accomplishing the noble task he has set himself to do." "Ah, yes," here interposed the young Vicomte, "I have heard speak of this Scarlet Pimpernel. A little flower — red? — yes! They say in Paris that every time a royalist escapes to England that devil, Foucquier-Tinville, the Public Prosecutor, receives a paper with that little flower designated in red upon it."

"We seek him here, we seek him there, Those Frenchies seek him everywhere. Is he in heaven? — Is he in hell? That damned, elusive Pimpernel"

"You cannot understand a man's actions unless you understand his beliefs."

"If you have any answers, We will be glad to provide full and detailed questions."

"Only the madman is ever sure."

"How do we know whether the Universe is getting bigger or the objects in it are getting smaller? You can't say that the universe is getting bigger is relation to anything outside it, because there isn't any outside for it to relate to. There isn't any outside. But if the universe doesn't have an out-side, then it goes on forever. How do you know it doesn't, shithead? You're just playing with words, man. -No I'm not. The universe is the inside without an outside, the sound made by one eye opening. In fact, I don't even know that there is a universe. More likely, there are many multiverses, each with its own dimensions, times, spaces, laws and eccentricities. We wander between and among these multiverses, trying to convince others and ourselves that we walk together in a single public universe that we can share. For to deny that axiom leads to what is called schizophrenia. Yeah, that's it: every man's skin is his own private multiverse, just like every man's home is supposed to be his castle. But all the multiverses are trying to merge, to create a true universe such as we have only imagined previously. Maybe it will be spiritual, like Zen or telepathy, or maybe it will be physical, one great big gang-fuck, but it has to happen: the creation of a universe and the one great eye opening to see itself at last. Aum Shiva! -Oh, man, you're stoned out of your gourd. You're writing gibberish. No, I'm writing with absolute clarity, for the first time in my life. -Yeah? Well what was that business about the universe being the sound of one eye opening? Never mind that. Who the hell are you and how did you get into my head?"

"THINK FOR YOURSELF, SCHMUCK!"

"Everybody is crazy," Saul said patiently, "if you don't understand his motives."

"You look blank, Joe," said Malaclypse. "Has no one explained to you that the human race is divided into two distinct genotypes - neophobes, who reject new ideas and accept only what they have known all their lives, and neophiles, who love new things, change, invention, innovation? For the first four million years of man's history, all humans were neophobes, which is why civilization did not develop. Animals are all neophobes. Only mutation can change them. Instinct is simply the natural behavior of a neophobe. The neophile mutation appeared about a hundred thousand years ago, and speeded up thirty thousand years ago. However, there has never been more than a handful of neophiles anywhere on the planet. The Illuminati themselves sprang from one of the oldest neophile-neophobe conflicts on record."

"Well, sir," said Cartwright "my basic finding is that life energy pervades the entire universe, just as light and gravity do. Therefor, all life is one, just as all light is one. All energies, you see, are broadcast from a central source, yet to be found. If our four amino acids - adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine - suddenly became life when you throw them together, then all chemicals are potentially alive. You and me and the fish and bugs are that kind of life made from adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine: DNA life. What we call dead matter is another kind of life: non-DNA life. Okay so far? If awareness is life, and if life is one, then the awareness of the individual is just one of the universe's sensory organs. The universe produces beings like us in order to perceive itself. You might think of it as a giant, selfcontained eye. Consciousness is therefor also manifested as telepathy, clairvoyance, and telekinesis. Those phenomena are simply non-localized versiosn of consciousness. I'm very interested in telepathy, and I've had a lot of succes with telepathic research. These cases of communication are just further evidence that consciousness is a seamless web throughout the universe."

""He [Hegel] is perfect... Unlike Kant, who makes sense only in German, this man doesn't make sense in any language."

"Feeling paranoid? Good: illumination is on the other side of absolute terror. And the only terror that is truly absolute is the horror of realising that you can't believe anything you've ever been told. You have to realise fully that you are "a stranger and afraid in a world you never made," like Houseman said."

"Correctly formulated, the Law [of Fives] is: All phenomena are directly or indirectly related to the number five, and this relationship can always be demonstrated, given enough ingenuity on the part of the demonstrator."

"You never disappoint me." Hagbard said. "If they ever hang you, you'll be arguing about whether the rope really exists until the last minute."

"April 29 - And what the hell does it mean to say that life shouldn't change too rapidly? How fast is evolution? Do you measure it in terms of lifetime? A year is more than a lifetime to many kind of animals, while seventy years is an hour in the lifetime of a sequoia. And the universe is only ten billion years old. How fast do ten billion years go? To a god they might go very fast indeed. They might all happen at once. Suppose the lifetime of your typical basic god was a hundred quintillion years. The whole lifetime of this universe would be to him no more than the amount of time it takes to watch a movie. So, from the point of view of a god or of the universe, things evolve very quickly. It's like one of those Walt Disney films where you watch a plant growing before your eyes and the whole cycle from bud to fruit takes about two minutes. To a god, life is a single organism proliferating in all directions all over the earth, and now on the moon and Mars, and the whole process from the first of the protobionts to George Dorn and fellow humans takes no longer than"

"The most thoroughly and relentlessly Damned, banned, excluded, condemned, forbidden, ostracized, ignored, suppressed, repressed, robbed, brutalized and defamed of all Damned things is the individual human being. The social engineers, statisticians, psychologists, sociologists, market researchers, landlords, bureaucrats, captains of industry, bankers, governors, commissars, kings and presidents are perpetually forcing this Damned Thing into carefully prepared blueprints and perpetually irritated that the Damned Thing will not fit into the slot assigned to it. The theologians call it a sinner and tries to reform it. The governor calls it a criminal and tries to punish it. The psychotherapist calls it neurotic and tries to cure it. Still, the Damned Thing will not fit into their slots."

""A is not A," Hagbard explained with that tiresome patience of his, "Once you accept A is A, you're hooked. Literally hooked, addicted to the System." I caught the references to Aristotle, the old man of the tribe with his unfortunate epistemological paresis, and also to that feisty lady I always imagine is really lost Anastasia, but I still didn't grok. "What do you mean?" I asked, grabbing a wet handkerchief as some of the teargas started to drift to our end of the park. "Chairman Mao didn't say half of it," Hagbard replied holding a handkerchief to his own face. His words came through muffled; "It isn't only political power that grows out of the barrel of a gun. So does the whole definition of reality. A set. And the action that has to happen on that particular set and on none other." "Don't be so bloody patronizing," I objected, looking around a corner in time and realizing that night I would be Maced. "That's just Marx: the ideology of the ruling class becomes the ideology of the whole society." "Not the ideology. The Reality." He lowered his handkerchief. "This was a public park until they changed the definition. Now, the guns have changed the Reality. It isn't a public park. There's more than one kind of magic." "Just like Enclosure Acts," I said hollowly. "One day the land belongs to the people. The next day it belongs to the landlords." "And like the Narcotic Acts," he added. "A hundred thousands harmless junkies became criminals overnight, by Act of Congress, in 1927. Ten years later, in '37, all the pot-heads in the country became criminals overnight, by Act of Congress. And they were criminals, when the papers were signed. The guns prove it. Walk away from those guns, waving a joint, and refuse to halt when they tell you. Their Imagination will become your Reality in a second." And I had my answer to Dad, finally, just as a cop jumped out of the darkness screaming something about freaking motherfucking fag commies and Maced me, as was certain to happen (I knew it as I crumbled in pain) on that set."

"April 24 - Objectivity is presumably the opposite of schizophrenia. Which means that it is nothing but acceptance of everybody else's notion of reality. But nobody's perception of reality is the same as everybody's notion of it, which means that the most objective person is the real schizophrenic. It is hard to get beyond the accepted beliefs of one's own age. The first man to think a new thought advances it very tentatively. New ideas have to be around a while before anyone will promote them hard. In their first form, they are like tiny, imperceptible mutations that may eventually lead to new species. That's why cultural cross-fertilization is so important. It increases the gene-pool of the imagination. The Arabs, say, have one part of the puzzle. The Franks another. So, when the Knights Templar meet the Hashishin, something new is born. The human race has always lived more or less happily in the kingdom of the blind. But there is an elephant among us. A one-eyed elephant."

"If you whistle while you're pissing, you have two minds, where one is quite sufficient. If you have two minds, you are at war with yourself. If you are at war with yourself, it is easy for an external force to defeat you. This is why Mong-tse wrote. "A man must destroy himself before others can destroy him.""

"In a previous incarnation, Harry saw himself as as centurion, Semper Cuni Linctus, driving the nails into the cross. "Look," he said to Jesus, "nothing personal. I'm only following orders." "So am I." Jesus said, "My Father's orders. Aren't we all?""

"That was a simple riddle used by Zen Masters in the training of monks, Joe remembered. You take a newborn gosling and slip it through the neck of a bottle. Month after month you keep it in there and feed it, until it is a fullgrown goose and can no longer be passed through the bottles neck. The question is: Without breaking the bottle, how do you get the goose out?"

"Who could tell what forms, what visions, what faces, what forgiveness he could see in the glow of the west!"

"Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory."

"Some great men owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they destine for their tools the exact quality of strength that matters for their work."

"Truth shall prevail — don't you know Magna est veritas . . . Yes, when it gets a chance. There is a law, no doubt — and likewise a law regulates your luck in the throwing of dice. It is not Justice — the servant of men, but accident, hazard, Fortune — the ally of patient Time — that holds an even and scrupulous balance."

"She said we lied. Poor soul! Well — let's leave it to Chance, whose ally is Time, that cannot be hurried, and whose enemy is Death, that will not wait."

"It was a great peace, as if the earth had been one grave, and for a time I stood there thinking mostly of the living who, buried in remote places out of the knowledge of mankind, still are fated to share in its tragic or grotesque miseries. In its noble struggles too — who knows? The human heart is vast enough to contain all the world. It is valiant enough to bear the burden, but where is the courage that would cast it off?"

"How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?"